When young James Coomer was offered a job as deckhand on the tugboat Pat Murphy at a dollar an hour, he took his first smell of diesel fuel and knew he was hooked. Life on the Ohio puts the reader in the pilot's seat as Coomer wrestles with runaway barges, navigates through ice and fog, pacifies angry crew members, and contends with the loneliness... more...

James B. Finley -- circuit rider, missionary, prison reformer, church official -- transformed the Ohio River Valley in the nineteenth century. As a boy he witnessed frontier raids, and as a youth he was known as the "New Market Devil" In adulthood, he traveled the Ohio forests, converting thousands through his thunderous preaching-and he was not abovebringing... more...

This comprehensive history examines communities on the northern and southern shores of the Ohio River that developed as a consequence of the Civil War. Darrel E. Bigham describes how these communities were shaped by the presence or absence of slavery and how the abolition of slavery and the rise of free labor became the rule of law on both banks.... more...

America. Enterprise. Metropolis. Cairo. Rome. These are a few of the grandly named villages and towns along the lower Ohio River. The optimism with which early settlers named these towns reveals much about the history of American expansion. Though none became the next great American city, it was not for lack of ambition or entrepreneurial spirit.... more...

In 1826 thirty-year-old Anna Briggs Bentley, her husband, and their six children left their close Quaker community and the worn-out tobacco farms of Sandy Spring, Maryland, for frontier Ohio. Along the way, Anna sent back home the first of scores of letters she wrote her mother and sisters over the next fifty years as she strove to keep herself and... more...

Since the nineteenth century, the Ohio River has represented a great divide for African Americans. It provided a passage to freedom along the underground railroad, and during the industrial age, it was a boundary between the Jim Crow South and the urban North. The Ohio became known as the "River Jordan," symbolizing the path to the promised land.... more...

Was the frontiersman Simon Girty a monster as painted by his U.S. enemies in the American Revolution, or was he a hero and benefactor of First Nations people as celebrated by Canadian and American Natives and the British? more...

In Jewish Communities on the Ohio River, Amy Hill Shevitz chronicles the settlement and development of small Jewish communities in towns along the river. In these small towns, Jewish citizens created networks of businesses and families that developed into a distinctive, nineteenth-century middle-class culture. As a minority group with a vital role... more...

"Gruenwald's book will make the same contribution to historical
knowledge of the Ohio Valley as Lewis Atherton's Frontier Merchant did for our
understanding of the mercantile Midwest in the mid-nineteenth century.... a finely
crafted narrative that lets the reader understand that the Ohio River always... more...